


Dear God, I Hate Myself

by PaxVobis



Series: Needles [3]
Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: Borderline Personality Disorder, Crying, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Graphic Self-Harm, Lullabies, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Sad, Self-Harm, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 17:19:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12085689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: Magnus couldn’t tell you what it was, if it was the film they were watching, or the hard and long shift at work earlier that evening, coming home just past midnight to shower and finding Pickles still in his room from the day before, in the same clothes as the week before, smoking his weed and pretending it was like nothing.  Or if it was the jealousy that kicked at him when he was around that guy, who had everything he’d wanted and then threw it away.  But it was, and he felt it before he felt the snap; the splinter through him like glass as he lay there with his head on Pickles’ shoulder, his grip locking around Pickles’ chest like a chain as he tensed with it.<-- Loomer | Chemicals -->





	Dear God, I Hate Myself

Sometimes, Magnus exploded.

Anyone could tell you that, _sometimes Magnus_ _just explodes_.  You didn’t have to hang around him for too long to witness it, the silence that stretched between empty spaces and then snapped as though you could hear it, and then you really could, with a kicked cat scream and broken bottles and slashed tires and cursing you to the ground and then back up again.  Sometimes Magnus exploded, and the fallout clouded the horizon as far as anyone could see.

But sometimes Magnus exploded, _inside_ , you know, a – an implosion, if you wanted, sure.  Before every screaming fit, before every knife plunged into rubber there was that little burst of blood, that _snap_ of tension, and from the outside it was nothing.  Just a little heart attack, a little twinge and Magnus froze.  You might get a whisper, if you were lucky, but the reality was that he choked those words out as the world fell away beneath him, as his insides crumpled and vanished down, and he was left standing in a void of nothing but –

God, nothing but –

But _fucked up._

Those words weren't big enough for the feeling.  It wasn’t just _hurt_  or _in pain_ , it was feeling so broken there was no way of putting it all together again, like looking at the bottle he’d just smashed over the concrete and knowing he was expected to drop to his knees and pick up every sharp edged piece, put them back together with his hands bleeding and slit and shaking.  It was an emptiness, but an emptiness lashing so violent that he quivered with the energy that poured out of it, a poison that poured through his veins and cut them all the way down his arms to his crazy fingers, shaking, closing around anything that would absorb it again. Yeah, an implosion.  And no matter what, who, he aimed it at, Magnus knew that he was the one hurting the most, the king of pain, chosen for this.

The thing was – the thing was for every violent explosion, every car driven into a wall, every girlfriend cheated on, there was another handful of silent breaks, cracks that ran up his body at a word or a thought or a memory and split him in two.  His grip tightening on the steering wheel and then just staring out the window into the darkness.  Collapsed on the shower floor with a bloody slash over his own chest, another razorblade, another dart in a hundred random, crazy lines, staring blindly at the blistering red stain with the hot water coming down on him while he shook there. 

Or this.

Magnus couldn’t tell you what it was, if it was the film they were watching, or the hard and long shift at work earlier that evening, coming home just past midnight to shower and finding Pickles still in his room from the day before, in the same clothes as the week before, smoking his weed and pretending it was like nothing.  Or if it was the jealousy that kicked at him when he was around that guy, who had everything he’d wanted and then threw it away.  Or if it was how ugly the little shit was, or how beautiful he still managed to be through the age that clawed at Magnus’ face like spindly, monstrous fingers, pulling lines in his young face – it was _young_ , fuck!  He was still so _young!_   He wasn’t even... thirty...

Or if it was having this guy in his arms as they sat together on his mattress and watched the little TV, knowing he had no one else.  Or if it was just that fact, the fact of having no one else, no one who could even see it until he tore something apart, something other than himself.  But it was, and he felt it before he felt the snap; the splinter through him like glass as he lay there with his head on Pickles’ shoulder, his grip locking around Pickles’ chest like a chain as he tensed with it.  But as soon as Pickles tilted his head to look at the hands, white knuckled, Magnus wringing his own wrist as he fought to keep the hole from opening in on itself, the split carried through down to the centre of the earth beneath them.

Pickles sniffed quietly, felt Magnus’ quivering as he pressed his face into the hempy and dank dreadlocks that tangled up the back of Pickles’ neck.  “This again, huh?” he mumbled, and then grunted as Magnus shoved him with his face, his teeth bared in a pained grimace as he bit down on the feeling and shoved it into itself, his arms tight around Pickles’ shoulders and squeezing him uncomfortably.  Where his face was pressed, shaking and breathing in the damp smell of Pickles’ knotted hair, he felt Pickles gulp as if he had anything to push down.

“Magnus.  Magnus.”  Pickles’ clammy hand was groping at his face then, shoving it out of his hair and into the light, trying to pry him off of his slim body but all Magnus could see was Pickles trying to bring this horrific and shameful pain into the bright light of the television, and as soon as Pickles tried to see them, to _drag them into the light_ , then the tears were hot on his face, and Pickles made a frightened little sound of alarm as Magnus suddenly released him and grabbed him by the shirt, but then rather than coming in for the slap Pickles expected, instead buried his face in the fabric, and there wasn’t a word that would come out of his seizing throat.

“Fuck, Magnus,” gulped Pickles, clutched and held still where he sat, and he lowered the hand with the bong he’d raised to hit Magnus in self-defence.  He let it lie by his knee and reached up again, turning his face stiffly to the cascade of curls and patting it awkwardly, and said, “It’s okay?  Dude.  Uh,” as if that’d change anything.  Magnus hid his face and slowly sloped down Pickles’ body, his shirt slipping from his shaking fingers.

It was hopeless, the wound was wide open.  Magnus collapsed into Pickles’ lap, the man’s legs crossed where he’d been sitting, the fusty, acrid smell of the unwashed denim filling his face like a plume of heat.  His hair, worn long as a symbolic shield against an unloving world, formed a more practical veil and blocked the television light from his face as he crushed it against Pickles’ thigh, though he could still hear the film blaring dully in the background of the excruciating crack.  Pickles rolled his eyes, and then his hand came down and patted Magnus’ hair, fluffing the curls helplessly as Magnus’ shoulders hunched and shook with jagged sobs.

“Uh,” said Pickles uncertainly, and then flinched as Magnus curled both hands into his thigh.  “Ooh.  That’s, uh, okay, dude.  Let it out, or, y’know.  Whatever,” he mumbled, and patted the curly, weeping mop in his lap as if it was his aunt’s terrible little dog.  Magnus did not want to let it out, but it came out anyway, without sound except hissing breath and violent shaking.

“Do you wanna, uh, talk about it...?” ventured Pickles, already picking up the bong with his other hand, but Magnus just shook his head with a powerful lash.  There was nothing to talk about, nothing to feel, no words for something so large.

And, “Okay, well,” said Pickles, and just sat there, and tried to watch the film again as Magnus hissed and heaved with it, tried desperately to pull the edges in again and his nails glanced across the acid wash denim of Pickles’ jeans, damp with tears.  An uncaring bastard, Pickles, a liar and a user, but as if Magnus was not the king of those things.  He deserved to be ignored – in fact, that was what he wished for, right at this moment – so why should it hurt so much to be ignored.  Fuck, nothing ever made any _sense_ – just fucked up, and then receded.

He was aware of Pickles punching a bowl, and the smoke coming down over him like a smothering blanket, that skunk stench that always hung around this room comforting in its way.  Pickles twisted one of Magnus’ curls between his fingers idly, zoning out at the TV, but he could not separate himself from the sad little tragedy that had collapsed into his lap.  Knew Magnus wanted him to ignore it, couldn’t suffer the silence between them.

Pickles had been that tragedy too many times, was unused to being the one who had to cradle it rather than the mess, the catastrophe, the pathetic one.  Though he was sure his mom must have held him like that – like... she must have, right?  Even if he couldn’t remember it – the first and most painful Pickles could recall was with his first LA girlfriend, Erin, a kinda chaste thing as it was for him at the time, as everything else hurt too much.  And being crushed in her lap, on the floor of her bedroom while her parents were away, a candle burning for light, and her braiding his hair with a ribbon while she sang him a stupid lullaby and just seemed to take away all his sorrow, pull it out of him and place it away for a while, a healing thing like that.

Pickles was not so naïve to think that he was a healing thing.  Nor was what he had with Magnus chaste or innocent in the slightest; it was a gross and indulgent two backed beast of convenience and laziness and self-revulsion, the amnesia of having someone else to be revolted by for a while.  But if he couldn’t be healing, perhaps he could be that, could soak it up like a sponge, could be a faux her while Magnus waited for a real one to get whatever it was that split him in half like this.  And though he felt stupid for it, Pickles stared into the television, twirled Magnus’ curl around his fingers, and recited it beneath his breath for the guy: “ _Sleep li’l baby, don’t you cry, the angels are above you, keepin’ watch over you.  The big blue moon is shinin’, the stars are beginnin’ to glow...”_

When Magnus heard it, he had the passing thought that this was very fucking gay, and then wept all the worse, Pickles’ voice faltering as he realised what he’d done.  “Oh, fuck...”

And they sat in silence until the shaking subsided, and Magnus raised his wasted, blanched face from beneath Pickles’ hand and glared up at him with bloodshot eyes, and Pickles – frightened, honestly, of what would come next, having seen all this, and seen it a second time, and worse – smiled strained at him and offered the bong.  “Cone?” he wheezed, and Magnus took it gently from him as he rose back up again.  And they did not talk about it again, not even the third time it happened, or the fourth, or any other – some things were impossible to explain.

And then some things were just better left unsaid.

It didn’t really matter which was true.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading this sad thing, this was my first attempt at writing bpd first person.
> 
> comments, feedback, etc, much appreciated.


End file.
